“Remarkable . . . With this book [Wolitzer] has surpassed herself.”—The New York Times Book Review

"A victory . . . The Interestings secures Wolitzer's place among the best novelists of her generation. . . . She's every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. This isn't women's fiction. It's everyone's."—Entertainment Weekly (A)

The New York Times–bestselling novel by Meg Wolitzer that has been called "genius" (The Chicago Tribune), “wonderful” (Vanity Fair), "ambitious" (San Francisco Chronicle), and a “page-turner” (Cosmopolitan), which The New York Times Book Review says is "among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot."

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.

Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.

lalareads(Grade: A–) The novel is definitely character driven, with a time changing plot that just works. I think the main ideas are success and friendship, and how one can threaten the other.
From the tone, I knew nothing huge - no major plot point or twist- was going to happen, yet I still wanted to find out what happened next. Don't get me wrong, plenty of things happen, just not in the way of more traditionally plotted books.
So, was The Interestings interesting? Yes.

(Rated on Jul 6, 2014)

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RemusLupin(Grade: B–) This book was captivating and well-written, but I couldn't decide whether the characters were relatable or just whiny. It seemed strange that although the story starts with a group of 6 people, not all are focused on equally. The non-chronological narrative was often confusing or jarring and at times I felt like the author was just working through a checklist of literary fiction themes: cancer, rape, autism, child abuse, depression, AIDS...

(Rated on Feb 24, 2015)

1

bookishbunny (Grade: C+) I really enjoyed this through the first section. I started to lose interest somewhere during the second and by the third I was just trying to get through it. I prefer plot-driven novels, but occasionally enjoy a character-driven one. With a character based one, though, you have to care about or relate to at least one of the characters. There is nothing else to carry it, otherwise. I didn't find that here. No matter how old they got, the characters seemed to basically remain self-absorbed teens.